Two pieces in my reading this morning stand out, and I wanted to share:
Scott Berkun sums up his Amtrak residency really thoughtfully – spoiler alert: he got to wear a conductor hat.
Davide Casali discusses rudeness blindness, ego, and leadership.
Category: Work
From the Introduction of The Counterinsurgency Field Manual
This publication can help compress the learning curve. It is a tool for planners, trainers and field commanders. Using it can help leaders begin the learning process sooner and built it on a larger knowledge base…
…Current tactics, techniques and procedures sometimes do not achieve the desired results. When that happens, successful leaders engage in a directed search for better ways to defeat the enemy. To win, the Army and Marine Corps must rapidly develop an institutional consensus on new doctrine, publish it, and carefully observe its impact on mission accomplishment.
This learning cycle should repeat continuously as US counterinsurgents seek to learn faster than the insurgent enemy.
The side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly wins.
Pay Motivates, But So Do Conversations About Pay
Really interesting piece from the Harvard Business Review, thanks for bringing my attention to it goes to my colleague and friend Jeremey DuVall.
Remote Leadership: Figuring Out Feedback
Working in a fully remote environment creates some unique challenges. One piece, that I’ve written about before, is the need to intentionally make visible one’s work.
This intentionality comes from the nature of the remote environment: we don’t have the natural day-to-day contact, the sort of diffusion of knowledge that one can gain from being in the same physical space.
Similarly, the need for feedback, for eyes on your work and your working style, is a very real need, and one that can be hard to figure out in a fully remote enviroment. I’m outlining here the way my team and I currently approach it – this approach has developed somewhat organically, out of company-wide surveys and smaller team discussions, and it’s working pretty well as far as I can tell. Like anything and everything we do, when it stops working, or when a better way to do it comes around, we’ll change!
Our current feedback structure has three types of feedback, each of which is quarterly, on a rolling basis. This means we end up engaging in one type of feedback every month. The three types:
- Peer Reviews – where each member of the team reviews one random other member (including me!) on ticket and live chat transcripts.
- 3-2-1-Oh Roadmapping – where I meet with each member of the team, and we chat about what they’re good at, what they’d like to be good at, and how I can support their journey.
- Leadback Surveys – where the team anonymously provides me feedback on how I’m doing as their team lead. Yes, there are Likert scales involved!
In this way we’re able to provide feedback to one another, I’m able to understand how folks are feeling and how they see their personal professional journey, and my team is able to help me understand how best to serve them.
Communicating with a Remote Team: One on Ones
Leading a team at WordPress.com is a great opportunity – I wrote about my approach this a little bit before – we’re a fully distributed company, and we’re always able to switch things up, iterate on our work as well as our meta-work, the labor that enables us to work at our best.
Continue reading “Communicating with a Remote Team: One on Ones”
Simon Ouderkirk 